‘Shaken faith’: Why are India’s elections under unprecedented scrutiny?
India has long held up its elections as evidence of its democratic credentials. Now their legitimacy is under question.
New Delhi, India – Indian democracy has been shaken by new revelations showing divisions within the body that is in charge of conducting its elections over controversial policies that critics say have disenfranchised tens of millions of people.
India’s Election Commission, a supposedly autonomous constitutional body, is tasked with administering elections in the world’s largest democracy, and in recent decades, had won admirers across the globe for its success in conducting a voting process unmatched in scale and complexity.
But an investigation by The Indian Express newspaper reported that the current chief of the commission frequently overruled concerns raised by his two other equally ranked commissioners about the integrity of ongoing changes in the voter database.
But as the exercise has been expanded to other parts of the country, those claims have increasingly returned to embarrass even proponents of the exercise: In New Delhi, notices were served to India’s Foreign Minister S Jaishankar and his wife, alongside other high-profile politicians, judges and senior bureaucrats. Several former Indian ambassadors to countries across the world have received notices to prove that they are Indian – even though they have served as India’s sovereign representatives abroad for years.